Perichoretic linguistics

De Certeau suggests that Cusa’s Germanized Latin provides a linguistic illustration of his theory of the “coincidence of opposites”:

“Germanisms haunt his Latin. They are the ghosts of a particular place (Rhineland, or Germany) in a different place, Latin, a language supposed to be ‘universal’ but in fact limited to a particular region and genealogy. They are at the same time traces in the present of a local speech pattern in an inheritance received from the past. Some Italian humanists attempt to suppress this contradiction by making Latin conform to the model of the ancient elocutio: in so doing they are substituting for the geographical or ethnic diversity of languages the hierarchical privilege of a language of the elite (scholarly Latin) over ‘vulgar’ ways of speaking. Nicholas of Cusa takes a different tack. He makes the transition from one to the other by an operation which consists in placing two qualitatively heterogeneous entities one within the other (German which specifies an ethnic identity, and Latin which allows an intellectual communication). His treatment of Latin is a coincidence of contraries. The linguistic practice already has theoretical value.”

For instance:

“It is not surprising that Latin words are frequently used according to German grammatical rules (the infinitive taken as a noun, deponents conjugated as passives, the terms aliud or duo used as invariable forms, countless specific constructions, such as the dative after participare-teilnehmen -and so on), or constructed according to German lexical models (such as epilogatio, improportionaliter, inunibilis, possest , and so on), or conceived in terms of analogous German words (such as explicatio in the sense of Auslegung , complicatio in the sense of Zusammenlegung , conjectura in the sense of Mutmassung , and so on).”